it's fine

Well of course we were behind in the recycling from over the holidays, three trips out to the garage last night just to get started and then a stinking-cat-food-tin miasma of sorting and re-shifting and then the last semi-hopeless stuffings into the garbage, followed by four more trips up the forty metres of lane, in the dark, when suddenly the wind came up, and the rain started in that determined half-sideways manner, and it was during a retrieval trip around the corner ('retrieval' in the sense of rescuing some scrubbed plastic that had blown all over the alley) that I suddenly found myself face down in a wet snowbank, my glasses skidding away for good comic measure. O Dignity. I once had such feelings for you, and attached so many hopes. Still. I retrieved and sorted my own self as best I could, as one learns to do after so many minor collapses, the way they add up, in that negative fashion, trying to mean something more, and found my feet back to the house just in time to see the trees go still, and the rain blow itself out, whoosh and then calm, as if by magic.

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This morning and some Red Hot Chili Peppers song on the radio -- the one that goes I don't ever wanna feeeeeeeeel, like I did that day -- and C remarked that no one she had ever known had ever said that they liked the Red Hot Chili Peppers, while at the same time she's heard a lot of people say how much they hate them. I think they just got overplayed, I remarked, because I was sort of re-listening to it, as you do sometimes, when you hear music in a specifically absent-minded but immediate way. Then Oona asked us to turn it off.

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The street littered with all sorts of plastic and tin garbage today, which felt like vindication, for all sorts of stupid reasons. Because now I will see it all winter, as it drifts around, like over the shores of some island too crummy for marooning.